Ludovic CourtèsToday #GNU is turning 40, whee! 🎉
Despite having been involved in GNU for 20 years, I wish I’d be more enthusiastic. It’s certainly an important milestone for #FreeSoftware but it’s kinda bittersweet for me.
🧵 #GNU40
I got into GNU by reading about free software, then attempting to contribute code to the Hurd ca. 2002, becoming a Guile co-maintainer ca. 2007, co-organizing a GNU Hackers Meeting in 2011, starting Guix in 2012.
I made friends along the way and learned a lot in a variety of domains—technical, political, social. From my early readings of GNU essays to my technical musings, GNU shaped part of what I am.
GNU’s still here, with tons of users many of which have come to value freedom, with projects like GCC, Emacs, and Guix alive and kicking!
However, while #FreeSoftware production and use has grown by orders of magnitude in that time span, GNU has failed to attract. Chaotic, arrogant, and divisive leadership led the project to be isolated (GFDL vs. Debian anyone?), to lose its dominant position (lack of GCC plugins fueled non-copyleft LLVM), and, worse, to alienate minorities.
GNU as a project has suffered from the founder’s syndrome.
I’ve seen high-profile contributors and entire sub-projects flee over the years. Some of us sought to pursue GNU’s mission by setting up the GNU Assembly, with a vision for collective governance: https://gnu.tools.
Fatigue, lack of incentives, and lack of a shared roadmap prevented it from going very far (yet?).
What’s next?
My take: building an OS remains relevant; we can build a truly empowering OS by combining the strengths of the toolchain, Guix, Emacs, and the Hurd—the opposite of a largely non-copyleft Rust/JS/Linux-based combo that puts developers and corporate interests first despite being #FreeSoftware “de jure”. In this day and age though, I believe we should also focus on scaling down, supporting limited-capacity devices.
Whether or not that becomes a reality, the good news is: the GNU vision for user empowerment and digital autonomy has seen beautiful followups beyond GNU, including the campaigns and software projects led by orgs such as Tor, Spritely, Framasoft, sr.ht, and all things Fediverse.
To me, today is a day to celebrate past successes of GNU and to look forward to a renewed GNU.
🎂 Happy birthday, and power to the users! ✊
Remco@civodul thank you for this inspiring 🧵 and thank you for #guix! Congratulations to everybody involved in #freesoftware, improving the world one bit at a time. 🥳
kb@civodul We need to break out of these cycles and create a federation of unique ideas focused on people, and users, and hackers!
Vivien (dentelle & numérique)@civodul If we want GNU to succeed for another 40 years, we have to let it run on devices emerging from damaged supply chains.
Juan Luis@civodul Linux is non copyleft???
כָּלב 
@civodul not just "tools"...
Doug Whitfield [Minneapolis]@civodul I've really tried to avoid this with CC CMA, but there hasn't been any sort of org like the GNU Assembly despite me calling for one multiple times. Of course, we have gone out of our way to not alienate minorities. Nonetheless, I won't be here forever. Projects really need to think about these things before they lose access to repos, etc.